


wishful thinking

by ABaskerville



Category: Maleficent (Disney Movies)
Genre: Pining, he's lucky udo is around to help, this poor birdman has a hard time with feelings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-06
Updated: 2019-11-06
Packaged: 2021-01-21 00:14:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 903
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21290516
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ABaskerville/pseuds/ABaskerville
Summary: Iron kills fey. Even a child knows this.He shouldn’t want you like this.
Relationships: Borra/Reader
Kudos: 118





	wishful thinking

Udo thinks he’s gone mad, probably, but he couldn’t bring himself to go back, because he’s sure Udo will take one look at his face and know for certain. He feels rubbed raw, stripped naked to the bone, his insides plain for all to see.

He hasn’t slept properly for weeks. It isn’t that he wakes screaming, though he should from the sun that burns in his chest when his mind conjures the memory of you catching his stolen looks, arching an eyebrow, narrowing your eyes when he glances away too late. Sometimes he hears your laugh when the sprites played with your hair, weaving flowers, and his hand moves at his side with the unbearable longing to run his own fingers through the soft-looking locks.

The worse dreams were the ones that took parts of memory and weaved his own wistfulness into it. You offering a cup of mead, then darting forward to catch the taste of honey on his mouth while Aurora’s back was turned. You stomping in the forest after him, dress hiked up to your knees to keep them from dragging in the brush, but falling again anyway, and begging him to just pick you up and fly before you stumbled into a hall too deep to dig yourself out from.

You sparkling in the noon light after you’d pulled him by the wing into the water with you. You couldn’t know that fey were careful with their wings, that touching it was reserved for family and lovers, but when you grinned at him like that, it was hard to convince himself it was all in wicked mischief.

You not stopping him as he loomed over your sodden form by accident, his hair dripping from the river, your hands half-clutching at his arm where the scars are and not minding them, your face turned upward, eyes unreadable, legs pressed around his thighs–

That one hadn’t been a dream. Or had it been?

No, it couldn’t be. You were sick now in the castle from that fall in the river, with that loud, obnoxious nest mother stalking over your shivering form on the bed, raising a ruckus to wake the dead every time she caught a sliver of a shadow of his wings outside the window. _He_ should be the one at your side. He would find a way to keep you warm. _He_ was warm. And he’d throw out all the iron in your things, because they were cold themselves, because they stung like a winter storm, because you didn’t need them anymore, because he’d kill anything before it could lay a hand on you–

“They told me the queen’s friend is sick,” Udo’s low teasing voice reaches him from a tree nearby. “they didn’t tell me you were as well.”

“I’m not sick,” Borra denies. Udo’s eyes ran over him with an amused glint, and he crosses his arms before he realizes that was a mistake. Udo’s white grin is more than he can bear, eliciting the urge to start a fight with the usually placid teacher, to release this burning inside him in a strain of wingbeats and bruised knuckles the way he did when he was a child filled with youthful helpless; or to go to his knees, beg his oldest friend to do something, anything, to make him stop craving the foreign perfume in your wake, the smell of iron stuck in your skin.

Iron kills fey. Even a child knows this.

He shouldn’t want you like this.

Wings beat and Udo alights in front of him, mirth dancing under the more placid expression he usually reserves for the nestlings. “Well, Borra or the desert, I don’t think there’s a cure for what you have anyway.”

The mournful sound that nearly sends the white owl into another fit of laugher couldn’t have come from Borra. But it must’ve been, and it’s all he can do to look away from that kind face, merciful in its infinite acceptance. He much preferred to be hit behind the head for folly. Udo was the only one who was never afraid to call him out of his stupid phases.

Udo shakes his head as he knew exactly what he was thinking, and begins walking away. “Come, old friend, let’s go find something nice for you to give the human when they get better.”

“I don’t–”

Udo shoots him a look over his shoulder, and Borra swallows the scream climbing up his throat, lest he call the rest of the moor’s attention.

Later, he finds a stone that reminds him of the beads on your clothes the first time he saw you, glittering in the firelight that caught the carved little jewels when you moved. Foreign guards in armor had stood at the edges of the banquet, like a living wall of iron whose eyes were fixed against any danger to their charges. The wind had sang a death rattle in his veins then, just as he caught he caught his breath at your face.

A sting as two tiny eyes blink open and he drops the stone. The creature burrows into the earth near his feet and is gone in a blink. Borra looks at his palm, red blooming like a wound. A bad omen.

Udo calls out ahead. Borra wipes the blood quickly away before answering, and pretends he doesn’t see the plant wither as he walks away.

**Author's Note:**

> Me: complains endlessly about not having enough time for all my readings.  
Also me: loses the struggle of not entertaining another fic idea.
> 
> How did you all find Maleficent 2?


End file.
